How flesh eating beetles are helping society

Walk through any natural history museum and you’ll see rows of effortlessly clean animal skeletons. Chances are you're looking at a strange form of human/insect symbiosis happening in the museum’s back rooms.

Walk through any natural history museum and you’ll see rows of effortlessly clean animal skeletons. Chances are you’re looking at a strange form of human/insect symbiosis happening in the museum’s back rooms.

Preparing an animal’s skeleton for display is incredibly labor intensive for human hands, so curators have turned to a family of beetles with millennia of experience.

The beetles’ waste creates a dirt-like substrata in their tank.

Colony of dermestes maculatus “flesh-eating” beetles at the Beaty Biodiversity Museum at the University of British Columbia.

Curatorial Assistant Chris Stinson estimates a total 20,000 beetles live in this colony,

The dermestidae family of beetles have followed humans since our early history. They’re opportunistic eaters, and they like the things we like: grains, bacon grease, leather, silk scarves, books, carpets. And as early humans traveled, the beetles came with, colonizing across the globe.

The majority of human relationships with these beetles is contentious, as they tend to wreak havoc on human possessions. They’re often exterminated as pests.

But several species of the dermestidae family have a taste for dead flesh. Including dermestes maculatus aka “the hide beetle.” And for this reason, curators have enlisted their help as “museum volunteers.”

At least, that’s what Chris Stinson of the Beaty Biodiversity Museum in Vancouver, British Columbia calls them. He’s the Curatorial Assistant of Mammals, Reptiles, and Amphibians and he approximates that he has 20,000 of these volunteers to prep the museum’s collection.

In this episode, Here Be Monsters producer Jeff Emtman smells the beetle tank, listens to them eat an owl skull, and holds a real flesh-eating beetle.*

A young larva, a mature larva, and an adult beetle.

Flesh eating beetles at work

See what it's like to get up close with the flesh eating beetle.

Photos: Jeff Emtman

Jeff Emtman produced this episode, with help from Bethany Denton and Nick White.